Whether you have invested a little or a lot in the Coheed and Cambria Chronicles, The Prize Fighter Inferno is a separate, more accessible world to sink into. In addition to achieving success with Coheed and Cambria, Claudio Sanchez is now taking on a whole new story angle as The Prize Fighter Inferno and a new album entitled My Brother’s Blood Machine.

In the last installment of Coheed and Cambria, we witnessed the death of the character Inferno, often referred to as Jesse (Coheed’s Brother) in the previous volumes. Inferno, the narrator of those stories, has now been resurrected on present-day Earth where he must tell the story of My Brother’s Blood Machine, which pre-dates the Coheed and […]

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Whether you have invested a little or a lot in the Coheed and Cambria Chronicles, The Prize Fighter Inferno is a separate, more accessible world to sink into. In addition to achieving success with Coheed and Cambria, Claudio Sanchez is now taking on a whole new story angle as The Prize Fighter Inferno and a new album entitled My Brother’s Blood Machine.

In the last installment of Coheed and Cambria, we witnessed the death of the character Inferno, often referred to as Jesse (Coheed’s Brother) in the previous volumes. Inferno, the narrator of those stories, has now been resurrected on present-day Earth where he must tell the story of My Brother’s Blood Machine, which pre-dates the Coheed and Cambria chronicles. Of the 11 songs on the album, we hear a softer side of Sanchez enveloped in mellow electronic grooves and gentle compositions. Some tracks adopt dance rhythms while others are hypnotizing in melody and verse.

“It wouldn’t make sense for me to do Coheed again in a side project,” says Sanchez. “Side projects should be very left field. I knew some of the material I was working on for Inferno wasn’t fit for Coheed, but I wanted to release it. A lot of the material is kind of old; some of it about 7-8 years old. It’s been a big work in progress. I love folk music and singer/songwriters, and I very much like sequencing and digital electronic music, so I just figured ‘why not?’

“When we were called Shabutie (Coheed’s original moniker), the initial idea for Coheed and Cambria was to be an acoustic/electronic side project. So I guess The Prize Fighter Inferno is kind of the original idea for Coheed and Cambria,” says Sanchez.

Sanchez’s imagination is a universe in its own right. When you first hear him speak the intricacies of his stories and the depth of his characters floor you. Suddenly, you find yourself completely entranced and you realize that you’re caught in that blurred space between what’s real and what’s not. In his own words, he reveals a bit of background on the story of The Blood Machine:

“The Blood Machine revolves around three families, but two are more important than the third,” says Sanchez. “The Bleam family is very much like a backwards Looney Tunes family where the husband and wife are insanely addicted to meth. The wife is out of her mind, and she thinks that God has come to her with a higher calling for her children, Longarm and Butchie Bleam. The mother tells them that God has given them a calling where they are the new ‘dealers of death.’ The sons believe that when the body dies the soul escapes, so they construct The Blood Machine in order to capture the soul when it leaves the body”.

While fleeing from her abusive father, the main character, Cecilia McCloud, finds herself encountering the Bleam Brothers in the woods, but what happens is best explained through the music of The Prize Fighter Inferno. So, take a leap into the catacombs of Sanchez’s tales with curiosity and an open mind, because after listening to My Brother’s Blood Machine, you will be fully engrossed in the tantalizing imagery of The Prize Fighter Inferno, and find that being caught between fantasy and reality is exactly where you want to be.

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Claudio Sanchez